Losing a War: Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard, Aug. 27, 2018— President Donald Trump opposes his own policy in Afghanistan. It shows.
The Islamic State’s Future in Afghanistan: Daud Khattak, BESA, Oct. 1, 2018— The Islamic State (ISIS) temporarily managed to win over disgruntled elements among the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban alongside youth from the remote districts in Afghanistan’s east soon after restructuring and renaming itself Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K) in 2014.
Pakistan: New Government Fails to Support Minorities: Kaswar Klasra, Gatestone Institute, Sept. 11, 2018— Radical Islamists took to the streets of Pakistan on September 1…
In Turkey and Pakistan, Discouraging Elections: Clifford D. May, Washington Times, Aug. 1, 2018 — Not so long ago, freedom and democracy seemed to be on the march in the world, with Turkey and Pakistan, two strategically important Muslim-majority nations, near the front of the parade.
On Topic Links
Election Rally Bombing in Afghanistan Heightens Security Fears: Zabihullah Ghazi and Mujib Mashal, New York Times, Oct. 2, 2018
The Afghanistan War Has Gone on so Long that People Born after Sept. 11 Can Now Enlist: Alex Horton, Washington Post, September 12, 2018
Future of U.S.-Pakistan Relations Rests Upon Progress in Afghanistan, Says Top Diplomat: Carlo Muñoz, Washington Times, Oct. 3, 2018
Pakistan’s Ahmadis Fearful as Leaders Bow to Extremists: Kathy Gannon, National Post, Sept. 28, 2018
LOSING A WAR
Thomas Joscelyn
Weekly Standard, Aug. 27, 2018
President Donald Trump opposes his own policy in Afghanistan. It shows. Trump’s disdain for the war in Afghanistan had long been well known, so no one in the White House knew what he would decide to do about it in the summer of 2017. Multiple options were on the table in Trump’s freewheeling administration. The president had heard plans ranging from privatizing the war under the authority of military contractors, to a narrowly defined, CIA-led counterterrorism mission, to a more robust deployment of American forces, to a complete withdrawal. Finally, after months of debate, Trump decided that the U.S. military would stay in Afghanistan and ordered a modest increase of several thousand troops. The president was frustrated that his own advisers had talked him into this option, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the deliberations. Nonetheless, Trump grudgingly owned it.
On August 21, 2017, the president announced his decision during a speech at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia. “Our troops will fight to win,” he said. “We will fight to win.” The president recognized that “the American people are weary of war without victory,” yet he vowed this iteration of America’s longest war would be different. “The men and women who serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory,” the president said. “They deserve the tools they need, and the trust they have earned, to fight and to win.”
No one is talking about winning the war in Afghanistan these days. America hasn’t even been trying to win the war. “We do look toward a victory in Afghanistan,” Trump’s secretary of defense James Mattis said in March. Mattis then quickly clarified that this would not be a “military victory.” Instead, the “victory will be a political reconciliation” with the Taliban. This is not what President Trump said in August 2017. In his speech announcing the policy, the president was openly skeptical that any such peace deal could be reached: “Someday, after an effective military effort, perhaps it will be possible to have a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.”
According to senior administration officials…that last phrase—“nobody knows if or when that will ever happen”—was Trump’s insertion. The president was wary of any strategy that hinged on the idea that a grand bargain with the Taliban was possible. He entertained only the possibility that “elements of the Taliban” could be convinced to lay down their arms—not the group’s senior leadership or the majority of the insurgents. Furthermore, the possible talks were to take place only “after an effective military effort.”
Despite Trump’s talk of winning, no such campaign ever materialized. There has been no effective military effort. The promises to furnish our warfighters with the tools they need to win—and a plan for victory—have gone unfulfilled. We are once again fighting not to lose. But we’re losing anyway.
The Taliban launched a massive offensive in Ghazni Province earlier this month. The jihadists ransacked parts of Ghazni’s capital city for several days before melting away into the countryside, much of which they already controlled. As Ghazni burned and its residents were sent fleeing, Resolute Support, the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, claimed the city remained “under Afghan control” and Afghan forces were merely performing “clearing operations.” It was a scene reminiscent of Baghdad Bob telling reporters in 2003 that all was well, even as American-led forces easily dispensed with Saddam Hussein’s men. The Afghans and Americans established some semblance of normalcy in Ghazni after several days, but by then the Taliban was already rampaging through other areas, killing dozens of security personnel.
The lack of demonstrable success has caused U.S. military commanders to redefine victory. Some of them now contend that the war is a stalemate in which the Taliban is incapable of overrunning Afghanistan’s more populated areas. They sell this as progress. But they are seeing the conflict through rose-colored glasses. The insurgents are capable of mustering enough forces for offensives throughout the country at any time. The Taliban’s men contest or control approximately 60 percent of the country—as much ground as at any point since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001. There is no reason to think they feel pressured to negotiate.
Trump preached patience in his speech a year ago, comparing his approach to President Obama’s. “Conditions on the ground—not arbitrary timetables—will guide our strategy from now on,” Trump said. This was a rebuke to Obama’s decision simultaneously to announce a surge in troops and a timetable for their withdrawal in December 2009. Military commanders knew that this created an incentive for the jihadists to wait America out, and that’s what they did. Trump also pointed out that President Obama “hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq” in 2011, thereby paving the way for the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS. But Trump, like his predecessor, signaled his doubts about the war in announcing his commitment to win it. “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts,” he explained.
Trump is an instinctive president—and an impatient one. Sensing that time is short, some administration officials are now attempting to negotiate a face-saving deal with the Taliban, one that allows America to leave without the appearance of having lost. Multiple news outlets in recent weeks have reported that the White House has given the go-ahead for direct talks with the jihadists. This effort will almost certainly fail—as it did under Barack Obama. One year after the president’s announcement of a new Afghanistan policy, it’s increasingly clear that the current approach to Afghanistan isn’t a radical departure from Obama’s but mostly a continuation of it…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE ISLAMIC STATE’S FUTURE IN AFGHANISTAN
Daud Khattak
BESA, Oct. 1, 2018
The Islamic State (ISIS) temporarily managed to win over disgruntled elements among the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban alongside youth from the remote districts in Afghanistan’s east soon after restructuring and renaming itself Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K) in 2014. IS-K’s initial victories against the Taliban and the Afghan government on both the battle and propaganda fronts rang alarm bells in world capitals, particularly among the weaker neighboring Central Asian states.
The group’s emergence and battlefield successes also panicked the Afghan Taliban, the insurgent group monopolizing violence in Afghanistan. For a while, their status as the sole non-state actor to take on the Afghan government and the international community in that country was challenged. However, over the passage of months, IS-K’s propaganda lost its appeal among common Afghans and Pakistanis as the group mostly reversed its battlefield gains in eastern Afghanistan. One of the prime reasons for these reversals is the group’s incompatibility with the region.
The majority of IS-K’s senior leadership was removed from the scene within months of the groups’ emergence in eastern Afghanistan in the second half of 2014. Hafiz Saeed Khan, Rauf Khadim, and Shahidullah Shahid, the founding members, were killed in drone strikes and special forces operations within a year of its announcement. The latest blow was the elimination of top commander Abu Saeed Orakzai, aka Saad Arhabi, who was killed in a joint operation by Afghan and coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan in late August. Arhabi was the fourth IS-K chief killed since the group’s establishment.
Apart from the eastern Nangahar province, Jawzjan in Afghanistan’s north was reckoned as the other stronghold of the Syria-based group. However, droves of IS-K fighters and commanders, both local and foreign, surrendered to the Afghan government in early August after a year-long siege by the Taliban. The surrender came less than a month after the killing of IS-K’s top leader, Taliban renegade Qari Hekmat, in a US airstrike in the same area. The rapid successive losses of senior commanders have kept IS-K from developing into a well-coordinated group like the Afghan Taliban despite its fighting skills and extreme brutality.
Apart from the Afghan government and the coalition troops, the IS-K’s biggest challenge on Afghan turf is the Taliban, the group that has monopolized violence since its ouster from power in late 2001. The Afghan Taliban draw their inspiration from the life and struggle of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the self-proclaimed Amir al-Mu’minin (Leader of the Faithful), who led the Taliban movement in the mid-1990s and seized Kabul from the warlords to establish a hardline regime in the country.
IS-K, on the other hand, shows allegiance to Abu Bakar Baghdadi, the leader of its ISIS parent organization, with little regard for the Taliban’s spiritual chief. Religious differences apart, the two groups are the antithesis of one other politically as well. An IS-K victory is reckoned as a loss for the Taliban, who would never allow an “alien” group to set up shop in an area they have retained and kept under their exclusive influence for the past 17 years. More than the Afghan government or the coalition forces, it is the Afghan Taliban who are resisting the IS-K presence in both the eastern and northern parts of Afghanistan.
Apart from intra-group grievances over the distribution of authority and other petty disputes, many commanders and fighters from the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban joined IS-K in the hope of gaining access to the huge financial support they believed (or were made to believe) was coming from ISIS. Even local thugs and criminals joined the group in some remote towns and villages to gain power and get access to the cash. At the very beginning, unemployed youth who joined the group were offered better monthly payments than Afghan policemen or soldiers, with the promise of still more in the days ahead.
However, hopes began to fade with the defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. IS-K would have continued to flourish, at least in areas where the group had established a foothold in the early stages, had they received sufficient sums from their Middle East-based patrons to support their jihadist activities in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. But that channel dried up very early on.
Afghan society is dominated by the relatively moderate Hanafi school of thought, while IS-K, like its ISIS parent organization, is a strict follower of Salafi ideology. That ideology takes its religious interpretation directly from the Hadith (the sayings of the prophet Muhammad) and the Qur’an rather than from any other individual or school of thought. Afghans are a traditional tribal society and they cherish their Islamic rituals, which incorporate local customs and traditions. IS-K’s puritanical version of Islam sees tradition-enhanced Islamic rituals as Bid’a (heretical innovation), and the punishment is death.
It is against this backdrop that IS-K has always been regarded by Afghans as a foreign force that has little regard for Afghan culture, customs, or traditions. One example is Afghans’ gathering together to pray for the soul of a deceased person or their visiting of graves and shrines. These rituals have no place in IS-K’s Salafist ideology…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
PAKISTAN: NEW GOVERNMENT FAILS TO SUPPORT MINORITIES
Kaswar Klasra
Gatestone Institute, Sept. 11, 2018
Radical Islamists took to the streets of Pakistan on September 1, to protest Prime Minister Imran Khan’s appointment of former Princeton University scholar Atif Mian, a minority Muslim of the Ahmadiyya faith, to the Economic Advisory Council (EAC). Demanding that Mian be removed from the EAC, a key forum that advises the prime minister on economic issues, demonstrators threatened to lock down Pakistan’s major cities, including Islamabad, its capital.
Mian’s appointment was opposed by Pakistan’s right wing political parties including “Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP)”, which strongly objected to his Ahmadi faith. In addition, a well-orchestrated social-media smear campaign is being waged against Mian — the only Pakistani on the International Monetary Fund’s 2014 list of the world’s “25 brightest young economists” — for the sole reason that he adheres to the Ahmadiyya faith.
Then, in a move that raised eyebrows both in Pakistan and abroad, the government succumbed to the pressure of Islamists by showing the door to Mian: he was asked to step down from membership of the EAC. He tendered his resignation on Friday following a request by the government. Federal Minister of Information Fawad Chaudhary confirmed the development…”The government requested Atif Mian, internationally acclaimed economist, to resign from the EAC because it wants to avoid a confrontation,” Chaudhary said.
This was not the first incidence of a well-qualified Ahmadi Muslim being targeted by extremist Islamists in Pakistan. In fact, discrimination against prominent members of this minority group is widespread. Take the case of Mohammad Abdus Salam, a Pakistani Ahmadi Muslim who in 1979 shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg “for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.” Salam was the first Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize in science, and the second person from an Islamic country, after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, ever to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in any field.
Soon after the Pakistani Parliament declared Ahmadis to be “non-Muslims” in 1974, Salam left Pakistan for London in protest. He died peacefully in Oxford on November 21, 1996, and was buried in Bahishti Maqbara, an Ahmadi cemetery in Rabwah, Pakistan. In 2014, his grave was desecrated and the word “Muslim” removed from the headstone, “on the orders of the government.” This shameful erasure illustrates the way minorities in Pakistan cannot escape humiliation, even after death.
The history of persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan is long and bloody. Since being declared non-Muslim in 1974, the small community of Ahmadis has been under constant threat by the hardline members of the Muslim majority…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
IN TURKEY AND PAKISTAN, DISCOURAGING ELECTIONS
Clifford D. May
Washington Times, Aug. 1, 2018
Not so long ago, freedom and democracy seemed to be on the march in the world, with Turkey and Pakistan, two strategically important Muslim-majority nations, near the front of the parade. That turns out to have been an illusion. Elections recently held in these countries have, paradoxically, made that clear.
In Turkey, votes cast in June gave President Recep Tayyip Erdogan powers he has long coveted. He is now, effectively, head of state and government, the military and the judiciary. For quite some time now, he also has been censoring the media, instructing private industry and filling his jails with enemies and dissidents. Brick by brick, he is dismantling the legacy of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, who founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and whose goal was the creation of a modern and secular nation-state.
Mr. Erdogan is increasingly allying with anti-American autocrats, in particular Russian President Vladimir Putin, notwithstanding Turkey’s membership in NATO, and the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whom he has helped evade sanctions. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Erdogan has been holding an American citizen hostage. Andrew Brunson, pastor of a small Christian church, has been accused of “Christianization using religious beliefs and sectarian differences to divide and separate the Turkish people.” What the Turkish president apparently wants is to trade Pastor Brunson for Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, a political rival living in exile in the U.S. The fact that Mr. Gülen appears to have broken no laws is just one reason it would be awkward for American authorities to acquiesce.
As for Pakistan, it was born in 1947 as an independent homeland for Indian Muslims unwilling to live as a minority in a Hindu-majority nation. Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisioned a polity that would guarantee human and civil rights to all its citizens – Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Ahmadis and others. “Islam and its idealism have taught us democracy,” he said in a 1948 radio address. “It has taught equality of man, justice and fair play to everybody.”
His dream has not been realized. Pakistan has spent much of its brief history under military rule. In the 1980s, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq began a process of Islamization which, over time, has become increasingly obscurantist and intolerant. For the past decade, civilians have been in charge and there was a peaceful transition of power in 2013. But elements within the military and intelligence services have continued to pull the strings from behind the curtain.
Farahnaz Ispahani, a former Pakistani legislator now at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, is not alone in believing that last week’s elections were marred by “media censorship, arbitrary disqualifications of leading candidates, manipulation of political parties by intelligence services, and the mainstreaming of terrorists.”
The winner was 65-year-old former cricket star Imran Khan and the political party he founded in 1996, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Ms. Ispahani characterizes Mr. Khan as “the Pakistani equivalent of Turkey’s Erdogan.” She adds that he has “earned the military’s trust.” She is not paying him compliments. The worldview of Mr. Khan, writes Sadandand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “blends the laziest leftist clichés with absurd Islamist fictions.” Mr. Khan “supports fundamentalist positions, including a cruel blasphemy law that leaves religious minorities vulnerable to lynch mobs.”
Mr. Khan’s “signature economic idea,” Mr. Dhume adds, “to turn Pakistan into an Islamic welfare state, belongs in a fairy tale,” given the debilitated state of the Pakistani economy after generations of mismanagement and corruption. During the campaign, Mr. Khan said: “Pakistan must detach itself from American influence and pull out of the ‘war on terror’ in order to create prosperity and achieve regional peace.”
In fact, Pakistan has long been an ambivalent participant in that war. On the one hand, we are permitted to use Pakistani territory to resupply our troops in Afghanistan. On the other hand, as Bill Roggio, my colleague at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and the editor of FDD’s Long War Journal, puts it: “Pakistan has accepted billions of American dollars, and used those funds to provide safe havens for the Taliban and other jihadist groups. Pakistan is directly responsible for the killing and wounding of thousands of American and allied soldiers.”
You’ll recall that Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan until U.S. special operators arrived unannounced at his villa. The claim that no Pakistani authorities knew he was in Abbottabad – a garrison town not far from Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital — is risible. Mr. Dhume also has reported that recently “a signatory of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of jihad against ‘the Jews and Crusaders,’ joined Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party.”
So to sum up: Elections in both Turkey and Pakistan have strengthened not democracy, but authoritarianism and Islamism. In both countries, freedom is not expanding but diminishing. Both countries have leaders who cannot be counted on to stand with Americans against those who might be seen as common enemies…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
On Topic Links
Election Rally Bombing in Afghanistan Heightens Security Fears: Zabihullah Ghazi and Mujib Mashal, New York Times, Oct. 2, 2018—A suicide bomber attacked an election rally on Tuesday in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, killing at least 14 people and once again highlighting security concerns as candidates prepare for an Oct. 20 parliamentary vote amid a raging war.
The Afghanistan War Has Gone on so Long that People Born after Sept. 11 Can Now Enlist: Alex Horton, Washington Post, September 12, 2018—A day after hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center towers, tore into the Pentagon and cratered a Pennsylvania field, thousands of babies were born in the United States.
Future of U.S.-Pakistan Relations Rests Upon Progress in Afghanistan, Says Top Diplomat: Carlo Muñoz, Washington Times, Oct. 3, 2018—The state of the recently contentious relationship between Pakistan and the Trump administration rests squarely on whether Washington’s new war plan for Afghanistan can turn the tide of the 17-year conflict, Pakistan’s top diplomat said.
Pakistan’s Ahmadis Fearful as Leaders Bow to Extremists: Kathy Gannon, National Post, Sept. 28, 2018—Pakistan’s embattled Ahmadiyya minority enjoyed a brief moment of hope earlier this month when one of its own, a U.S.-based Princeton economist, was appointed to an economic advisory council.
